Ward Hadaway
“The combined saving on data management time, backup speeds, and reduction on our data center footprint has been beyond what we expected.”
Established in 1988, Ward Hadaway is one of the largest law firms in the North of England, with 93 partners, almost 500 staff, and offices in Newcastle, Leeds, and Manchester.
Overview
Ward Hadaway’s IT team is responsible for implementing the four main objectives of the company’s IT strategy: improve IT infrastructure; increase efficiency; maintain and improve security and compliance; and migration to the cloud.
Director of IT and Facilities Jonny Smith explains:
“We currently and historically have always relied on on-premises infrastructure. However, we are very aware that cloud services are becoming more and more popular, cost-effective, and easy to manage.”
Ward Hadaway has approximately 150 servers, of which 98% are virtual machines (VMs) and the remaining 2% are physical. Together, they store 25 to 30TB of data. They previously had an in-house solution with replication to another site that had become expensive and time-consuming to manage, unreliable, and no longer fit for purpose. The shortcomings of the old system were placing a big burden on the infrastructure team and raising concerns about the viability of the backups and the speed and effectiveness of replication. Meeting the firm’s RTO/RPO became increasingly difficult. The older, lower-spec hardware also meant that these systems would perform significantly worse than the live infrastructure if they had to fall back to them.
Rubrik as a Service
Assured’s fully managed solution for backup, archive, disaster recovery, and replication has made Ward Hadaway’s IT function more efficient. It has removed the burden of managing DR tests from their IT team and given them the confidence that they can recover their data in its entirety.
They have three different locations in the UK—Leeds, Manchester, and Newcastle—where the majority of their data resides. They now have a Rubrik cluster on-premises, which backs up everything locally inside their network, encrypts it, compresses it, and, most importantly, stores it on an immutable platform. Their data is then sent across the internet, incrementally, to the Rubrik cluster in Assured’s primary UK data center, meaning it can be recovered more quickly.
As part of the solution, Assured monitors Ward Hadaway’s backups 24/7, reporting on and fixing any issues, ensuring there is always a clean copy of their backups available.
“Our IT team’s management time has been reduced immeasurably; our Snapshot stun has all but disappeared; SQL log backups are replicated off site numerous times per day; backup jobs finish comfortably in their window; RTO and RPO can now be accurately determined; a single file restore has been reduced from 30 minutes to 30 seconds; Forever Incremental Jobs mean that once an initial job has been completed all further jobs just copy changes—again, a huge time saver. We are so happy with our backup and DR strategy with Assured. The combined saving on data management time, backup speeds, and reduction on our data center footprint has been beyond what we expected.”
– Iain Richardson, Infrastructure Manager, Ward Hadaway